Woman With Dancing Fingers

Learned the Art in England from Grandfather

 

Madame Jewell.  Orpheum Star with Dancing Manikins, Eloped with Her Father’s Assistant when in France --- Now a Widow, Is Wrapped in Her Art and Manikins.   Of course everyone has guessed that Madame Jewell’s manikins are operated with wires.   How it is done was believed to be a secret, but the premiere artiste merely takes the Wires in her fingers and, keeping in perfect time with the orchestra, makes the figures dance and that’s all there is to it.   So the “Woman with the Dancing Fingers” is no idle jest—it is a stern reality. Madame Jewell’s lot is not as easy one.   Here more elaborate figures and their difficult dances require the constant and simultaneous handling of from twenty-five to thirty wires on each of the figures, although she has the help of her son and two Other assistants in the act the job is nerve-racking and back-breaking, she told a Times-Union representative yesterday, Another thing to be taken into consideration about this work, is One fact that the music time is almost twice as fast as the ordinary dancing time and as every point of the manikin has its own work to do it is controlled by a separate wire operated from a balcony built just within the miniature stage and carried as a part of the props of the act.  From this balcony, immediately over the dancing figures, Madame Jewell has to stand is an uncomfortably bent positions.    Asked if her manikins did not occasionally make a mistake in their dances or do something not on the program, Madame Jewell said: “They sometimes do, and then I just call them awful names and they never do it again.”

“Once while in Paris,” continued Madame Jewell, “I was playing at a children’s benefit and one of my manikins fell to the stage and was broken, causing a sympathetic little girl in one of the boxes to begin to cry, for she believed the figures to be human.  We had to let her come back on the stage and convince her that it was only a doll.  When she became convinced that the figure was but a doll, she began to cry again for she wanted the doll, and we had to take her out.” 

Another instance she related was of a week she played in Boston, where a large crowd of boys and girls would wait outside the stage door “for the little people to come out.”

All of the manikins were made to order in England, being hand-carved from wood, but were put together in the United States by Madame and her son.  The hinge-joints are all of a specially made brass, and the painting and dressing of the figures, are not only accurate representation of the characters in life, but the artiste sews every stitch of the garments herself to be sure there will be nothing to hamper the movement of the manikin when it is in action.

The dress of the little figure representing Gertrude Hoffman in the Salome dance shown at the Orpheum theatre this week, cost Madam Jewell $75, in her studio in New York City she keeps a stock of tons of limbs and various parts for her manikins, in case of accident.  This she has done only recently, because about a year ago while playing at a benefit in Jamaica Long Island, near New York city, the theater burned out and she lost her entire production, but, very fortunately she was running two acts at the time, and had one left as a reserve.

“Apprentices in the manikin work are very hard to train,” she said. “One has to be born in the business.  My grandfather and my father, both of whom were named John Holden, showed the manikins more years ago than I can remember, and I began to work with them when I was a little girl. We are English, you know.  I fell in love with my father’s principal assistant, Mr. Jewell, and we eloped to France and were married.  My father wouldn’t forgive us so we started our own show.  The show I am giving now is far superior to any of the old shows of years ago as it is a much more elaborate in every way.

I carry several thousand pounds of excess baggage, an awful lot for an act of 29 minutes duration, don’t you think so.” She queried.

Mr. Jewell died in New York City six years ago and now Madame Jewell and her 24-year-old son, Jack, and two assistants, give the show.

Madame Jewell thinks so much of her fingers that she has them insured against accident for $10,000 and says that she has to have them continually in training to keep them nimble.  She said that when she takes a week or two off to rest she finds that her fingers need retraining.